While Howard Jones has marshalled a good deal of very interesting data on the USA's involvement with Vietnam and states clearly that" America's role as freedom's guardian warranted its intervention in South Vietnam." and in another place notes that the Kennedy adminstration promoted the general's coup against Diem; professor Jones fails to properly afix the blame for this extraordinally matter of the Ambassador to a nation plotting the toppling of the President and his assassination prior to even presenting his credentials . The fact that Lodge was ordered by JFK to stop the coup by JFK and that Lodge refused to do so , the fact that Lodge held longstanding hostility towards JFK due to home politics is made light of . The whole matter of how Lodge engineered the disposal of the CIA Chief of Station is also not put in proper context nor how he used and exploited Lou Conien for his personal agenda . And finally Jones does not delve into Diem's last phone call to Lodge , where from other sources it is quite ecident that it was Lodge who in turn called the Coup Generals to tell them where Diem & Nhu were so they could be murdered . The book is sub-titled How the assassinations of Diem and JFK prolonged the Vietnam war. A btter line would have been how the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem lost the Vietnam war.